NEW YORK: President Obama will not be visiting the Golden Temple, the Sikh holy shrine in Amritsar owing to a very packed three-day schedule in Mumbai and Delhi, and not for any other reason, Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communication, told reporters on Oct 27.
News reports a couple of weeks ago had suggested that President Obama had cancelled his visit to the Sikh temple because he was likely to be perceived by his detractors back home, as a Muslim since Sikh tradition requires that a scarf be worn to cover the head while inside the temple.
Responding to a question if that was the reason for dropping Amritsar from the President’s India itinerary, Rhodes, who has been leading the trip planning and has known this trip at every stage of its development, said, “It’s (India) a big country where we’d like to do a lot of things. It’s an extraordinary country and we can never do as many events as we’d like to do. We send advance teams to far more places than we’re ever going to visit.”
“The schedule that we ended up (with) is the schedule that best advances the purposes and interests of the trip. We’ve got a very packed three days in Mumbai and Delhi that speak to those priorities that reach out to the Indian people as well,” he further explained.
“So we arrived at the schedule we arrived at because we thought it was the best way to have a successful trip. We’ve visited multiple religious sites – mosques, churches, synagogues – on foreign travel. We’ll do so on this trip, probably in Indonesia. So I think that the decision we made was driven by, again, the interests of time, how to best advance our common interests with India in these three days. And, unfortunately, we’re not going to be able to get to get to every place we advanced.”
Rhodes said that when the trip planners really crunched it – Mumbai and Delhi – with a very packed official program, the schedule they arrived at for those two cities filled up the time successfully.
At the planning stage, Rhodes said, they had looked at different stops to potentially visit including the Golden Temple. “We looked at a broad range in India – and so I don’t want to kind of get into litigating out places that we’re not visiting beyond saying that we usually try to incorporate a cultural stop, cultural outreach into our trips. He (President Obama) has very much enjoyed in the past his opportunity to pay respects to the vast diversity of cultures around the world. In India, you have one of the most dynamic and tolerant and diverse societies in the world and we want to pay tribute to that. And I think that’s particularly why, for instance, we wanted to have an event where we could celebrate in some fashion Diwali with Indian young people, and why we wanted to ensure that we had a culture stop in Delhi, in this instance visiting a tomb that has served as a precursor to the Taj Mahal and speaks to the huge – the enormously impressive civilization that India has had over many centuries.”
Responding to whether the Golden Temple could fit into a future visit, Rhodes said, “Certainly we wouldn’t rule out any visit in the future. And, hopefully, we’ll be able to return to India.”
SRIREKHA CHAKRAVARTY
India Post News Service
